


The Strauss Girls

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: The Book Thief - Markus Zusak
Genre: Backstory, Bonding, Gen, Minor Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-22
Updated: 2014-02-22
Packaged: 2018-01-13 10:16:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1222531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first thing that Rosa Hubermann ever says to Max Vandenburg that doesn't involve the soup or the state of the blankets is this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Strauss Girls

**Author's Note:**

> This originally started as a Rosa&Max bonding fic, because reasons, and then developed into a full-fledged Rosa backstory fic before I knew what it was up to. I'm … not 100% sure how I feel about this fic? It's hard to reconcile the Book Thief narrative-esque style with Rosa's voice, but I tried my best.
> 
> Spoilers, obviously, for the book, and there are a LOT of cameo appearances by minor characters.
> 
>  **Warnings** for allusions to the Holocaust, a brief childbirth scene, and one mention of suicide.

-

 

When Wilhemne Strauss gave birth to her fifth daughter on a cool and rainy spring evening in 1896, it was not quite the state of affairs she'd been planning on.

For one, she had no name for the girl. It hadn't occurred to her that she might not have a boy this time, like somehow the chances for a girl were supposed to diminish with each successive birth. 

Not that she particularly _minded_ girls -- she had no patience for those who would try to pit female against female to make them decry their own sex. The way she saw it, the only people who benefitted from it were men. It was just … she had so many of them already, wasn't it time for a change?

She thought of her mother and her husband's mother, but both of them were already accounted for in their first two daughters, and in the next two, the only grandmothers that mattered. Of the other two grandmothers who were potential name donors, one had been a Roma traveler and the other a Calvinist, so they clearly wouldn't do.

Herr Strauss, when he came in to see how mother and newborn daughter were doing, tugged at his whiskers and offered, "Well, there's always 'Elsi.'"

Wilhemne looked at him for a long moment, then picked up her empty drinking cup from the bedside table and threw it at him.

It bounced off his chest, hit the floor, and spun to a stop.

When he fetched it and put it back, his wife informed him, "We are _not_ naming our daughter after your childhood mare."

He chuckled deeply and responded, "See? You are not at such a loss."

In the end, she settled on Rosa, after a character from a novel she'd read once as a very young girl, on a trip up north to the Schleswig territory, during one of those times when it couldn't decide whether it was Danish or German. (The ridiculousness of the situation was one of the few things Austria and Prussia ever agreed upon, and the area now safely resides under Prussian control. It only took a war or two.) To this day, it remained the only thing Wilhemne Strauss had ever read cover-to-cover that wasn't the Bible.

She liked it, and when Rosa was an infant without much personality to display, she liked her, too.

She already had four workhorses for children, and nurtured the idea that perhaps she could finally raise a rose of a girl, for variety's sake; someone she could keep close to her apron, who would be better at embroidery than lifting hay bales, who would take care of her in her old age.

But, just like the rest of her sisters, Rosa grew up short and squat and entirely disinterested in being delicate or gentle or benevolent, and Wilhemne gave up.

It was the last time anyone pinned any kind of expectation to Rosa Strauss and thought she might come easily.

 

-

 

"I have five sisters."

She packs the words up, boxes them together, and sets them down with a heavy thump. 

It's the first thing she volunteers to Max Vandenburg that doesn't involve soup or clothes or the state of the blankets. She thinks it'll do nicely.

"Four older and one younger," she adds, clumping it with the others and putting it down on the steps like she would the food.

She's addressing a collection of paint tarps drawn up into a vaguely humpy shape that wouldn't suggest a hidden body unless you knew it was there. Hans comes down to talk and to collect the waste, and Liesel avoids it entirely, as if proximity might make her books spontaneously catch fire. Rosa isn't sure threatening to burn her books was necessary, but regardless, it seems to have worked: they might as well have taken her eleven-year-old jaw and wired it shut.

She waits for a beat.

Then the tarps reply, "I have six cousins."

She says, " _ja,"_ because he can't see her nod, and it's only when she's half-way up the basement steps that she realizes they both used the present tense out of pure self-preservation.

 

-

 

The thing about being the second youngest in a family of six girls is that she disappeared, without fail.

She wasn't the youngest and therefore not the baby, and she wasn't the oldest, who were the first to do _everything_ \-- her elder sisters got all the new clothes and new experiences, which they dutifully passed down to Franziska and Rosa and Gitte when they outgrew them; toys, pinafores, the scandalous practice of kissing boys, all secondhand.

As a child, Rosa never had much to say.

("Yes, really. What was that look for, you filthy swine, do I have something on my face?")

There was her father, her mother, her sisters, the dairy cow, the pigs, and an unholy cluster of chickens kept in a coop right underneath their bedroom window, all of whom were very good at talking just to hear their own voices, and instead of learning how to shout louder, Rosa just learned to listen. This meant that for the longest time, nobody bothered with Rosa Strauss longer than it took to determine that she was pleasant enough to look at, but Crucified Christ, she was dumb as a lump of coal.

For some reason, people always like to assume you're stupid when you don't talk a lot, but Rosa's found that there's an awful lot of stupid people who talk plenty.

When she married, and finally had her own home -- then, Himmel Street was actually much the same as it is now, although the cobble hadn't been laid in the road yet, but you could tell which one was Number 33 because it was the only one with a fresh coat of paint, mixed specially as a wedding present for her -- it was the quiet that unsettled her the most.

She thought, being in town, that perhaps it wouldn't be so bad, but with the absence of her sisters and the animals, Rosa found herself listening to the things the walls had to say, the creak of the stairs as they settled, the groan of the water pump out back. In the evenings, she went with Hans to the pub, where there was chatter and music and cheeky soldiers fresh back from France asking her about a dance, and he'd play his accordion the entire way home, even when the youngest Olendreich children pitched open their window right on cue and flung little projectile cracked peanut shells at him, and she'd be able to forget about the quiet until the next morning.

"You mind yourself now," she tells Liesel once, when she comes into the kitchen to find the girl murmuring laboriously over a page of text in one of her books. "Talk to it enough, you might find it talking back."

"Yes, Mama," Liesel returns, in the tone people use when they haven't the faintest clue what you're on about.

 

-

 

The farm had belonged to her father's father, and his father before that (who'd taken it as a spoil of war from a mild-mannered fellow who wasn't much fussed about the great destiny of the Prussian Empire, but everybody usually skipped that part of the story,) and one day was supposed to go to the eldest daughter and whatever husband she desired, so long as he be a good farming man.

"Well, _that_ doesn't narrow down my choices very much, have you _seen_ the options around here?" Trudy complained, and, "ow!" when their mother brought her spoon down hard on her knuckles.

Her future inheritance was a little plot of land that lay situated almost directly on the Amper River; it contained the cottage house, a small but serviceable barn, and a mill for the grain that the Strausses were very fond of, but that everybody else considered to be antique.

("They've got factories for that now, don't they?" Johann Hermann asked stupidly, and yelped like a startled calf when three of the six Strauss girls hit him at once.

They were very loyal, the Strauss girls, you understand, and anyway, you shouldn't trust Johann Hermann. He _reads.)_

Theirs was the first farm you encountered when you crossed the bridge from town, so it meant that the family often saw a lot of traffic: all the farm kids had to pass this way on their trek to school, and then everybody would go by on Sunday, since the closest church was in Molching proper. There was another bridge, up closer to the rich side of town, but Rosa didn't know anybody who used it who didn't live there. It had iron struts and was all very fancy.

Some of her sisters had friends from the neighboring farms, and church was always a social minefield (none of them knew anybody who actually used the church for its intended purpose, because worship was nice and all, but more importantly, there was the week's gossip to be shared,) and sometimes Rosa thought little Gitte might be nursing some sweetheart sentiment for that Johann, but when she herself took a tally of her friendships, she came up with just the one:

Her sister, Franziska, who was closest to her in age, who slept beside her at night in their little cottage house. She'd been born the summer before, and like Rosa, she was short and had hair so black and straight it was like it'd been drawn on top of her head with a pencil.

Also like Rosa, her favorite thing in the world was to compare third parties to her own ideal standard and list all the ways they were deficient.

There was nobody in the world Rosa Strauss loved more.

 

-

 

Max Vandenburg is at their kitchen table.

It is late afternoon, but with the shades drawn, it's more like twilight: the light that comes in is yellowed, softened by fabric, shut up like a sickroom. Max keeps looking around, each unsteady blink a slow fall of his eyelashes, because it's been a very long time since he's seen their kitchen in the daylight.

No one will think it strange to find their shades drawn, not today, and anyway, they couldn't have this talk in the basement: she needs the kitchen light to sew up the gash across her husband's hands. The Nazis whipped him in the street, and it's taking all of Rosa's strength to keep her own hands from shaking themselves stupid with anger.

Hans, of course, is useless, shocked and muddled and swimming in guilt, the silver in his eyes tarnished.

Max keeps looking from him to her. His sketchbook huddles atop the table, half-hidden underneath his hand like a very small pet. Liesel's been sent to bed, even though it's scarcely past dinner. They can all hear her walking in circles; the floorboards groan, abused.

Rosa thinks.

Roa thinks, fast.

Where can they hide him? Where else can Max Vandenburg possibly go? The Gestapo will come. Right now, it's only matter of how many more infractions need to be investigated before they reach Hans Hubermann, stupid Hans Hubermann and his stupid, _stupid_ weeping generous heart, and Max cannot be here when they arrive. It's a very simple problem.

She parts her cardboard lips.

"The farm. On the Amper River," squeezes out through the gap. It flutters to the table, a small slip of a statement caught on an eddy.

Two sets of eyes alight on her.

"My old home," she clarifies. "They never rebuilt it after it burnt, but the millstones are still there, and so's what's left of the bridge. There's enough for shelter."

Hans Hubermann looks at his wife in wonder.

"You're right," he realizes. "Nobody goes there. You'll be hidden and safe," he turns to Max now, his voice a plea cluttered atop the table with the rest. "Temporarily. As long as it takes me to -- to do whatever -- anything -- whatever I have to do fix this, and then I'll come get you and we'll _come back,"_ and a smallness tears at the corner of Max's mouth, a near-smile, because what else is there to do when Hans Hubermann turns that earnestness on you?

He looks again to his wife.

"Do you have a map?" he says urgently. "To help him find his way there tonight?"

Rosa makes a rude noise.

"Write down what I tell you," she orders Max, and his hand twitches open the sketchbook in a kneejerk response to her tone.

She gives him the directions: Rosa Hubermann knows how to find her way home, even in the dead of night.

 

-

 

Liesel Meminger was not Hans and Rosa's only foster child.

The first came to them while Hans Junior and Trudy were still living at home. The Reich, at that time, was toddling into its second decade as a unified government, and the Nazi Party had not yet gained majority, although most considered it to be only a matter of time, and the boys on the street had taken to hassling her son.

"What's going to happen to your papa, Hubermann?" The jeers gored at him, struck straight through his back. "You know what they call him at party headquarters, right? _Der Juden Maler_ \-- the Jew painter."

Those boys. 

Only brave in packs, and only brave when they're picking on just one.

But Hans was losing costumers, and when Hitler rose to power in 1933, the situation in the Hubermann household was very hand-to-mouth, and getting worse. So when Gitte came down from Munich for a visit and mentioned a certain Frau Heinrich, who often stopped by the convent to collect charity supplies and who worked in the social services, which gave allowances, you know, for people who opened their homes for fostering -- well. Sweet Gitte. Sweet, baby Gitte. She was brilliant.

The first fosterling Frau Heinrich set them up with was, coincidentally, a Molching boy. His name was Peter.

Hans Junior took to him immediately, having had no compatriot in the house except for Trudy, who was entirely uninterested in his pursuits. The boys were only a year or so apart and liked the same things: iced buns, the cherry-aid that Herr Diller would sometimes sneak them while his wife wasn't looking, and the imagined glory that would come with Germany's splendid rise to power.

"Was he that boy --" Hans Hubermann finally, _finally_ asked. "The illegitimate one born in that house on Heide Strasse?"

"Oh, _now_ he puts the pieces together," Rosa said in aggravation. "It's just as well I didn't marry you for your smarts."

She remembered. The house on Heide Strasse was shut up all through the war, while people like Hans Hubermann were getting shot at on grassy hills and people like Rosa Strauss were screaming and shaking her sisters awake in the middle of the night while the French soldiers took their flamethrowers to the fields as part of the Munich blockade, and when it opened again, nothing much had changed, except for one of the maids, who had in her possession a year-old son. Peter.

Whatever the Reich tried to tell you, there were black people in Germany. The maid on Heide Strasse was one of them.

Peter could pass at first glance -- tall, with strong jaw and strong shoulders, beige skin and hair that matched -- but it was his nose that gave him away. Rosa caught him once or twice in the washroom, poking at it in the mirror, trying to thin it out.

When Hans Junior joined up with the party, he was sent to Munich proper, where his skills as an apprentice painter were needed for the flurry of new _Fuhrerbauten_ ("Fuhrer buildings") that were being erected in Hitler's honor. Munich was, after all, the birthplace of Nazism.

Peter did not go with him, choosing instead to accompany his foster father to the Knoller in the evenings, where he was eventually taken on as help.

He phased out of social services, and Hans and Rosa filed with Frau Heinrich for more.

They were, it turned out, very good at it.

Competence is attractive, and the Hubermanns gained a reputation. When the curious case of the Memingers landed on Frau Heinrich's desk at a time when Hitler was rapidly overturning every stone, looking for scapegoats, it was them she thought of. She visited and brought the situation with her, patted down into a few component parts: "Two, this time. A sister and a brother. Slavs, I think, judging by what little I've seen of the mother's alphabet, although it's impossible to get any answers out of her. They've clammed her up tight. But you see why I'm eager to get them in a home and the file shut before -- well, before they come with questions."

"What will we do if they come and question us instead?" Hans Hubermann asked. It wasn't out of the realm of possibility: his home had been ransacked before.

Very tiredly, Frau Heinrich said, "They are very young. Nine and six, respectively. Never let them think they are anything but German, _verstehst?"_

 

-

 

A little after the Fuhrer's birthday, 1940, Rosa turns to her husband in the silent, empty kitchen and says, "The next time you go to the Knoller, you check on Peter, understand?"

"… _ja."_

Three nights later, he sits down on the bed next to her and says, "He's gone. Herr Schmiekl said he took all of his savings and used it to emigrate to Spain, three months ago."

"Good," says Rosa, and goes back to sleep, until Liesel's screaming wakes them both a few hours later.

 

-

 

That first winter, they trade congestion and cough back and forth, again and again.

As soon as Max -- always the last to get one and the last to get over it -- clears up from one virus, Liesel would bring home another one from school and promptly passes it over like it went in-hand with the washing and ironing money. Rosa gets very sick of the sound of sniffling.

One night at the stringy end of January, a few weeks before Liesel's twelfth birthday, they're all sitting by the fire; Max in his corner like a boxing ring, Liesel on the rug, Hans in the chair, and Rosa on the bed with her feet up, thank God, and they pass around a bowl of steaming water and a damp towel, trying to clear their stuffy heads.

"All right, _saumensch,_ you've had it long enough," Rosa slaps down, her voice murky with snot. "If you hand that thing up to me and it's cold, you _do_ know who's going to have to go boil more, don't you?"

"Yes, Mama."

Carefully, she lifts the bowl up to Rosa (still warm, and oh, how the ache in her head eases already,) and then, suddenly, Liesel giggles.

It trips out of her and lands on the carpet, splashing there like the contents of an upended teacup.

"Sorry," she says, when everybody looks from the laughter stain on the carpet to her and then back again.

Then she giggles again, and this time, Papa joins in. A few chuckles scrape their way out of Max's throat, too, flinty like he's not sure they won't catch alight.

(A year from now, when Liesel hovers behind her and asks, _Mama, will he survive?,_ Rosa will tell her, _if all those colds we gave him didn't kill him, this certainly won't, he has too much practice. Now make yourself useful, girl!)_

"What is _wrong_ with you all?" Rosa demands grumpily when they don't stop.

Hans spreads his hands and says, "Look at us, Rosa," and then shoves at his red nose with a handkerchief. "Aren't we the true faces of treason?"

And Liesel and Max laugh harder, shapes curling up on the rug like they're burning and hurting with something.

"That's not a joking matter!" she hisses out. They've all gone mad!

But her husband just continues, scarcely able to get his words out through snatches of laughter, "What would the Fuhrer say -- do you think -- if he could see us now?"

Max pipes in, "The great threat to the pure German ideal!"

And even Rosa has to smile at that one: this exaggerated, grandiose voice coming out of a skinny Jew with a runny nose, _Mein Kampf_ jumping nervously in his hands, because isn't it ridiculous -- when you stop and think, isn't it absolutely ridiculous that this is what an entire nation has been trained to fear: people, just people, people who get laid out with headcolds, just like them.

 

-

 

Rosa considers motherhood to be largely an act of aggression, a strategy that had to be played purely on offense.

Certainly, she had a talent for it, much the same way she had a talent for aggravating everyone she'd ever met, the same way Hans had a talent for painting and her sister Franziska for being singularly offensive and Liesel for getting herself covered in _some_ kind of filth. And anyway, Hans Junior and Trudy turned out all right -- well, more or less, there was that little hiccup about politics, but surely once the young Nazis had pounded their chests enough and burned a few synagogues, that mislead surge of nationalism would dry up, right, and they'd all get over it? She hadn't raised the kind of boy who would murder other boys, she _knows_ she didn't.

Trudy drops by unannounced the weekend after Max's twenty-sixth birthday, full of hugs and apologies, saying she won't be able to come for Christmas the following week: her family of employment's seeking safety in the countryside, and as a nanny she is, of course, a vital expense.

"You take care, girl," Rosa tells her, bundling her up into a bruise of an embrace. "Being country didn't stop the French from burning down my home in the last war."

"Mama, you were just down the Amper River, that wasn't exactly country," Trudy says congenially, bruising her back.

The Hubermann women bear the shape of each other in their bones, everyone says.

"Back then, it _was_ country."

Trudy stays until well past nine that evening, at which point they have to push her out the door or she'll miss the last train out. Hans offers to walk her to the station, "you coming too, Mama?" he asks, slinging his coat around his shoulders, and she retorts, "What, and leave this one to put herself to bed? _That's_ a shovel of pigshit waiting to happen."

"Mama!" Liesel protests. "I'm almost thirteen!"

" _Ja, und?"_ Rosa says with an eyeroll at her oldest daughter, who grins back.

As soon as she sees them turn the corner by Frau Diller's, she twitches the curtains shut and turns to the stove, while Liesel hurries to the top of the basement steps and throws down the all-clear to Max. Well-meaning and efficient, Trudy'd cleared away their dinner before Hans or Rosa could come up with an excuse to save any, and -- quicker on the uptake than her parents -- Liesel tried to feign ill so that they'd set her food aside, but Trudy, with the absent-mindedness of someone used to living in privilege, just cleared that bowl away too, still full.

"Didn't know she was coming today," she says when Max appears. It's the closest to an apology she's willing to hand over.

"Please, don't worry about it."

" _Nein,_ sit down, the both of you, you'll be fed, and fast. It's late enough already. Blast that girl," she says, and doesn't mean it.

Liesel sits at the table, Max sits on the top step, hidden from view by the basement door, and Rosa grumbles at them both until her husband returns, saying, "She's on the train all right." And then, awfully, "she's scared."

Silence jams itself awkwardly into the room -- everybody watching it stumble and bumble and none of them addressing it -- before Rosa finds something else suitable to start in on: Trudy's family of employment, those selfish swine, hurrying off to the country so they can be comfortable while everybody else pinches and scrapes and waits to see if the enemy is going to start dropping bombs.

After, while Liesel scrubs at the pot, Max pauses. His voice, when it comes out, minces its way over to them. 

"I'm sorry about your daughter. I've only ever heard her voice, but -- she seems very nice, from that."

He vanishes, his descent back into the basement near-silent. Movement catches Rosa's attention, and she looks over as Liesel lets the pot sink in the basin. She translates the mischief on her face too late; the girl flies over to the top of the steps and throws her voice down it, suds dripping off the ends of her extended fingertips.

"You'd like her a lot!" she calls, gleeful and teasing. "She's very beautiful, and only a few years younger than you!"

Rosa: "Liesel!"

And Max, scandalized: " _Excuse_ me?"

Liesel laughs, and a beat later, shrieks and dodges: a dried paintbrush hurtles past her head.

 

-

 

Max's voice, when it comes, pokes at her gently, with timid fingers that feel at her pockets. 

It says, "What happened to Trudy?"

"Hold still," Rosa snaps back. "And for Christ's sake, keep your arms out straight."

"Sorry." It's four months later, and this is the first time she's gotten Max Vandenburg on his feet since he woke up. When his bare arms start trembling, she catches them, under the guise of feeling them the same way she'd checked his ribs for worrisome bumps or sores, the same way she'd pressed her fingers into the soft spots under his jaw, feeling for swelling.

She grouses at him, "Stick your 'sorry.' Lucky for you, you're putting the weight back on -- _good,_ because I have to go stand in the ration line and I certainly wouldn't have time for your nonsense if you weren't. You can put your shirt on now, hurry up, and what was that about Trudy?"

Max accepts the aggressive shove of her affection in its course, and says, "You never told me. About her."

His skin disappears from sight. His modesty had only lasted as long as it took Rosa to wallop him and say, laughingly, _and who do you think had to keep you clean the entire time you were asleep? You didn't magically just stop shitting, I promise, you stupid arschloch._

"She's gone away to the country with those rich pigs. Why do you ask?"

"Not your daughter." He finishes the buttons on his undershirt, and she pushes his sweater at him next; it's as grey and limp as the rest, but good quality and heavy, and Rosa takes a moment to thank Walter Kugler, wherever he is, for clothing Max marginally better than they could. It might have saved his life. "Your sister."

She pauses. 

"The eldest one, right? Who was supposed to inherit your land."

Inside her chest, her heart hiccups.

The washroom is narrow, the tiles grey and corroded with rust, and Rosa Hubermann gathers herself up in great big armfuls like she would the washing and says, "She fell through the ice."

She doesn't look at him.

"We brought her in as soon as we could, and heated up the hottest bath, thinking that would -- thinking -- well. We didn't know. There was no way for us to know back then, that you're not supposed to heat it too hot, that the shock of it would --" She hands him his coat, all the violence gone from the gesture. "I was twelve."

 

-

 

Until the age of eleven, Rosa attended school with the others, crossing the bridge and cutting through the developing outskirts of Molching through mud and rain and snow.

She never had much interest in it, knowing the way all farm kids do that she wasn't going to be there long. She sat with Franziska in the schoolroom and in the yard, they jumped rope together and plotted how to steal the ball away from the boys. They were often joined by Wolfgang Edel and a couple of his friends, who were all a little too duck-footed or ill-fitting in their own skins to be much use in the ball game.

Wolfgang Edel came from a family of carpenters and was going to be a carpenter and none of them knew exactly what that entailed at their age, but he believed it and so did they.

He lived in town, which was novel: Franziska and Rosa hadn't socialized much with town people before, assuming, as you will, that people who lived in town had to be rich. Didn't you have to be, if you didn't grow your own food just to survive? And it's only when they got to know Wolfgang and his boys that they realized that no -- if anything, you could be even poorer, in town.

"-- good at it," he went about saying one day, watching Rosa and Franziska expertly steal away some of his crew to swing the jumprope for them while they double-Dutched through sheer force of will. "Like Hubermann here is good at mixing paints," he jabbed his thumb at another one of his friends, a gangly beanstalk of a boy who never seemed to be walking the same direction his limbs seemed to be taking him. He looked up at the sound of his name, smiling absently; he was studying a trail of ants that worked its way between his legs. "What are you good at?"

Rosa shrugged. She clapped hands with her sister and they changed places, still skipping.

Franziska, of course, spoke for her. "Rosa's really good at mixing words," she said proudly.

He looked at them. His disbelief wrote itself all over his face. He took it, balled it up into a single word, and punted it at them. "Really?" It hit them hard, turned bits of them splotchy and red.

"Yes," said her sister, "you'll see," and Rosa cut them a smile.

Franziska spoke for her until Rosa came out with her own fists one day, flagging Wolfgang down after he let some of the younger children make off with her jumprope and hitting him with a fist to the middle of his back and snarling, "What did you do that for, you filthy _saukerl?"_

It was the first time she ever branded anyone who wasn't a Strauss with that particular title, and the result was wonderful:

Wolfgang Edel's jaw dropped. His eyes turned the color of beetles, iridescent and surprised.

"Excuse me, I do _what_ with pigs?" he demanded, after a beat or two of stuttering.

Behind him, Hans Hubermann hid a smile behind his hand, to no better effect than a single cloud trying to hide the sun. Rosa's eyes snapped to him, then back to Wolfgang's screwed-up face, and she felt the peculiar, warm sting of pride. (She's liked Hans Hubermann since that time when they were seven, when he caught her picking her nose and wiping it on the back of Johann Hermann's sweater for lack of anywhere better, and he didn't say a thing, just smiled. You earn a lot of loyalty for a thing like that, and Rosa's never forgotten it. She won't know much about him until later, when they've both left school and he'll go out of his way to continue existing in her peripheral. He's an only child, town-bred but with a farmer's work ethic, with a slow, conscious way of interacting with the world that only comes with abject poverty. Respect shaped him early.)

Rosa Strauss's greatest achievement to this date is a vast collection of insulting, offensive things to call people.

You have to be creative with your insults, in a family like hers: all the good ones were already taken by the time Rosa got old enough to start talking back to her sisters, all of their gratifying scandal and sting worn out of them. So she invented new ones.

 _Saumensch_ and _saukerl_ , she feels, are her crowning victories.

You won't find them in a dictionary, but there are probably people in Molching who will laugh at you if you try to tell them that, given the number of times they've had it flung at them by a very short, irate Rosa. She wasn't anticipating how popular they'd be with the Steiner kids, who picked it up like they would scripture or the national anthem, hurtling _saumenschs_ and _saukerls_ at each other's retreating backs while their mother watched with bemusement.

The Steiners moved in next door when Hans Junior was four, Trudy three. 

They were teenagers, then -- Alex Steiner still had puffy baby fat underneath his jaw, but he and Barbara had hard hands, with scrubbed knuckles and uneven nails like they'd clawed their way into the space they currently occupied, and they kept to themselves at first. Rosa thought them rude.

"They're shy, Mama," Hans told her, pinning his sleeves up to help her wring out the washing. His eyes twinkled at her. "Imagine moving somewhere where everybody knew each other growing up, it seems like, and not knowing how to start new friendships. Besides, they're sweethearts -- right now, the only thing they need is each other."

Rosa harumph'ed. "Well, I will go over there tomorrow, then," she said, already planning out how to shove a conversation on them.

"Perhaps I should go first," Hans suggested lightly. "You tend to … take some getting used to," which was a stupid thing to say when Rosa was within reach and armed with a lot of sudsy water and wet clothes. He got yelled at, and slapped, and soaked, and even kissed, though _that_ took some earning.

Hans Hubermann's nicest vest came from the Steiners -- a gift given to him in exchange for painting their nursery.

The giving streak, she finds, runs in that whole family.

 

-

 

On mornings on which there's no work, Hans goes down into the basement to sit on a paintcan and talk to Max once Liesel's been seen safely off to school.

He's setting up a pattern, the way he did with their foster children, Rosa realizes, albeit one who comes to them a little older than the rest. He started with Peter when Peter was new on Himmel Street, and continued with the others, including Liesel and her midnight classes -- it's a time of day in which Hans Hubermann's time and attention belongs to nothing else, should it ever be needed. It's a way of saying, _I am reliable, I am here._

On mornings in which Hans does have work, Rosa substitutes.

Max doesn't have much to say at first that isn't a direct answer to her questions about the food ("more than enough, Frau Hubermann, thank you,") or the blanket ("more than enough, Frau Hubermann, thank you,") or the cold, dark space ("I'm sorry, I shouldn't be here, I shouldn't have put you at risk, I --"), so she develops a habit of bringing some easily portable chore or another down with her, to work in proximity. Same time, every day.

_I am reliable, I am here._

Max Vandenburg, she finds, is an excellent listener, and there's nothing Rosa likes more than venting at great length to an audience that can't easily escape.

"Tune in every fifth word or so," Hans advises him cheerily. "You aren't missing much," and, _"ow!"_ when Rosa's wooden spoon immediately cracks down onto his knuckles. He makes a show of hissing and sucking on them to relieve the sting, then winks when he thinks Rosa's turned her back. Liesel winks back, and even Max offers a starved, exposed rib of a smile.

Once, when Rosa's in the basement and she glances over mid-complaint, she doesn't see the casual mess of drop sheets and silence she's used to.

It takes her a moment to reconcile what she's looking at -- a hand, suspended atop a thin wrist, has emerged from the drop sheets. Max has taken one of her husband's old painter's pencils and drawn on the inside of his hand, creating dark eyes, serious eyebrows, and a mouth skewed in a bizarre frown around his thumb.

It's a hand puppet, the kind Rosa hasn't seen since her own children were small and fond of mocking their teachers (and each other.)

The silence stretches, settling itself on the stones between them, and the puppet's nose scrunches up.

"What is _that?"_ she asks.

The head swivels around on the end of Max's wrist, checking behind it like there's _anything_ else she might be referring to.

Then Max's voice emerges; a patter of sound amidst the plastic.

"It's Frau Holtzapfel," he tells her. "If you're going to rail at her so, she'd best be present." The puppet's nose scrunches again. It does, actually, look a little womanly. "Is it not a good likeness? I'm afraid I had to guess -- I haven't had the pleasure of meeting the woman personally."

"Well, aren't you lucky," Rosa grumbles.

The puppet works its mouth back at her mockingly, haughty, and Max might never have met the woman, but he sure can capture her expression. She laughs, and since nothing endears someone to her faster than a mutual derision for a third party, Max Vandenburg is her friend from that moment on.

 

-

 

"Rosa," Max's voice darts out in front of her. "The door."

She claps her mouth shut, and there it is, the sound of it distant: a knock, firing against the front of Number 33.

She looks at Max. He looks at her. They move in the same instant -- Max sliding sideways, off the bottom step, disappearing underneath his tarps like a rat darting into a hole, and Rosa gathering up his bowl and the utensils she was polishing and ascending the steps, fast. The bowl she discards into the sink, before she hauls the door open out from underneath the knocker's fist.

"Frau Hubermann?" It's Agnes, Rolf Fischer's daughter, and she seems derailed by her appearance. Her eyes tag the spoons, the polishing rag, and the open basement door. "Were you … working in the basement? Didn't you hear me knocking?"

Fear flares like a struck match in Rosa's throat, but fortunately, her mouth opens with the ease of long practice and replies for her, "I did not. Maybe I'll do all my chores in the basement from now on, just to get some peace from the stupid creatures always harassing me."

Three years ago, Agnes Fischer's father reported Hans Hubermann to the NSDAP. They suspended his application. They searched their home, top to bottom. They gave him the nickname of "the Jew painter" so that their children could taunt their own until they drove them right out of Molching.

Bless her heart, the insult goes right over Agnes's head.

"But isn't it usually just the Steiners visiting you?" she asks with some confusion. "Or Frau Holtzapfel?"

Rosa says, "Exactly, you see my point."

And this time, Agnes's mouth twitches with a smile, and Rosa is safe.

 

-

 

"Frau Hubermann?"

"You know my name, you swine. Use it. And pass me -- thank you."

" _Ja._ You never said -- what happened to Franziska?"

 

-

 

When the war starts, and Rosa loses all but two of the washing-and-ironing customers, she starts cutting expenses wherever she can. But she has four mouths to feed and a husband with unreliable income and when the early start of 1941 warms into spring without much change in circumstance, she's confronted with the stomach-melting, horrible sensation of feeling her fingers touch bottom of their penny jar.

She writes a letter to Gitte. It feels all manner of wrong, asking for help from her baby sister, but Gitte, at least, could be relied upon to _not_ come visit.

With a Jew in their basement, it doesn't seem like the right time to encourage company.

Gitte, bless her, doesn't send money -- vow of poverty and all that. But she sends a package that contains the following: four pairs of nylon, two old, two new; two rolls of twine; kerosene; one pair of scissors. Liesel takes one look and immediately loses interest (no books, and therefore not interesting,) but for the first time in a long while, Rosa fights the temptation to kiss the cross. She knows as well as any Strauss girl how to make all these things last a very long time.

 _Do you have any news from Franziska?_ is all the note attached says. _She doesn't write to me._

By the time June comes, they've only got the one customer left: the mayor and his wife.

It's not a bad month, not really, although Rosa's not short on things to complain about -- that miserable, irresponsible Frau Holtzapfel, Liesel's friendship with that swaggering lout of a Steiner boy -- did you see what he came home covered in the other day? She swears she can still smell it -- and the stench of paint fumes in the basement, from where they've been painting the torn-out pages of _Mein Kampf_ and hanging them on the laundry strings that Rosa used to use for the washing. All those months of practicing on his hands for Rosa's benefit, and now Max has graduated. It's miserable. Liesel hogs the paint!

"What's got you so happy, then?" Her husband interjects into a pause in this litany. "Are you feeling all right, Rosa?" 

He makes like he's going to check her forehead for a temperature, and she retaliates by shoving a still-wet page into his face.

"Hey!" Max protests.

They paint the page over again, of course, but Max and Liesel both solemnly swear there's a section in his sketchbook that still bears the imprint of Hans Hubermann's startled expression.

These days, when Liesel comes home, she'll fly in the door with a "Hi, Mama!" and Rosa will just barely have time to get started, rumbling up into a " _saumensch,_ you --" but she's already tromping down the basement steps, demanding Max's attention with news about what the clouds are doing, or one of Rudy's stories about the sadistic Franz Deutscher, or a question that needs immediate answering.

Rosa, personally, quite likes the weather reports, when she catches snatches of them. On good days, when the basement door's open and Liesel's voice carries clearly, she'll still her hands for just a moment and lean towards the window, watching the progression of the sky exactly as it's being described down below; humpy clouds and jet trails like papercuts and all.

She can tell the exact moment the change in circumstance registers with her preoccupied husband, because he's sitting at the kitchen table one day when Liesel darts by, newspaper in hand.

She acknowledges him with a brief, "Hello, Papa!" before she's gone, disappearing down into the basement.

Hans blinks after her, and blinks again when Max's delighted voice mounts the basement steps like it's got light feet of its own. It never does that for one of their visits.

The expression that crosses his face right then makes Rosa put her spoon down and laugh herself sick.

She laughs and she laughs, and when she catches her breath, she starts into, "You poor bastard," with great and thorough enjoyment. She puts a hand on his shoulder to balance herself. "You poor, sad bastard. How does it feel, hm, to _not_ be the most adored person in this house? For once?"

He frowns, steadying her with a free hand. A beat later, he must realize she's teasing, because he makes an injured noise and grabs for her spoon, and she has to wrestle it back from him.

 

-

 

For three years, Rosa Strauss lived in a convent with sixteen other girls, most of whom she knew -- neighbors whose farms and homes had been razed with fire, too, to form the Munich blockade. The Allied plan was to starve the Bavarians out and take the capital, and it worked splendidly.

She was lucky, she thinks now, that she got to stay with the two sisters she had remaining to her, that they had no brothers who'd be taken elsewhere.

She and Franziska slept in side-by-side beds underneath a window that got direct, cold sunlight in the winter, and Gitte was in the room next door with a Jewish girl named Isi, and they had three rules for existing:

1\. Don't let anybody call them orphans, even though that's technically what they were.  
2\. Respect the nuns.  
3\. Don't do anything that might get them separated. Strauss girls are loyal, Strauss girls stay together, and that doesn't change just because everything else has.

Gitte was still young enough for school, but Rosa and Franziska were put to work almost as soon as they changed out of their funeral blacks. Washing and ironing -- every day except Sunday, when the nuns did their prayers and then parish rounds, leaving the girls under the supervision of a matron named Frau Hulshoff. Rosa and Franziska sustained their musculature, scrubbing and cranking the clothes press every day, but no matter how strong they got, no one could ever beat Frau Hulshoff when it came to a good arm wrestle. The woman was a bullfrog, but kindly; she was their appointed chaperone, and she was sympathetic to the romance that occasionally happened in the convent yard; boys who snuck through the gate to hold hands and kiss girls between the rows of potatoes and rioting mint.

The problem started with a soldier named Karl, who became Franziska's beau the spring of 1919, the same week that the old Austrian emperor was exiled to Switzerland. He was part of a regiment stationed in Molching -- the plan, he said, was to attack and take back Munich, to force the socialists out, and they wanted to give them no ground to run to.

"I thought we were all part of the Reich now," Rosa squinted at him.

They were sitting by the banks of the Amper River, down by the parts where nobody went, which wasn't nearly as romantic as it sounded, not in the spring with the snowmelt turning everything to mud and slush, and Rosa tried her best to ignore that Franziska and Karl were holding hands behind their backs; their fingers wrapped around each other, his thumb brushing back and forth across her knuckles with aching slowness.

"That's the plan," he said back. "And that's how it's going to be."

And Franziska tilted her head back, smiling at him, for once strangely wordless.

They were a secret, the two of them, one that made Rosa's stomach twist with unease. The first time she saw them kissing in the shadow of the square where they hold demonstrations (where later they'll have bonfires), she cornered Franziska in their room that night and hissed, "Are you _crazy?"_

"He promised," Franziska whispered back, as fierce and flat as someone flinging up a hand to defend themselves. In the dark, her eyes were stains of color, her mouth a gash of blackness as it opened and pleaded with her, "Please, Rosa, he promised."

"That what? He'd leave that wife whose ring sits on his finger? That he'll marry you instead?"

" _Yes!"_

And there was something in her voice that made Rosa pause, something warm and leaking -- Rosa, who knew her sister better than anybody else in the world, heard the lovesickness in Franziska's voice and knew nothing she could say would get through to her.

 _Fine,_ she thought, wordlessly accepting the tin of Vaseline passed between their beds so that she could nurse the cracks in her hands. _They'll have their affair, he'll leave with the other soldiers, I'll put her heart back together, and she'll have learned from this._

Besides, Rosa had problems of her own to deal with:

Hans Hubermann had returned from the trenches in France.

 

-

 

Two days after Max Vandenburg takes flight, Rosa Hubermann loses her temper.

Their house sits boxily on Himmel Street, empty and silent as a bird's nest in autumn, and when Rosa slams out through the gate to Number 33, her breath hits the cold air and puffs out, as pearlescent as cigarette smoke. Between their houses, Frau Holtzapfel works at the water pump: she's not dressed for the weather, the flexing muscles in her shoulders visible under her blouse. She looks up and opens her mouth automatically.

"Don't start with me today," Rosa bites off, slamming it down on the cobblestone.

Such is her tone that Frau Holtzapfel's jaw snaps shut like a trap, and Rosa turns and strides away.

She makes it to Frau Diller's shop on the corner, _heils,_ and asks to use the phone, which is the only one on Himmel Street. She pays for the privilege, picks it up and tucks it between her chin and shoulder like she's seen other people do before, and calls her sister. Shame curdles atop the stove of her heart and lungs.

In the ringing tone, she hears the echoes of her own words:

_You shut your mouth, you don't get to cry! This is the second son we've lost to your stupidity!_

It was the first time she's used Hans Junior as a weapon to hurt her husband, and the way all insults do when they go too far, she thinks it might have hurt her just as much as it hurt him. She'd left him gored by it, sitting at their kitchen table. She feels like she must have left a trail of blood all the way here. It has to be dripping off of her, surely.

"It's almost Advent, Frau Hubermann," the voice is saying on the line. "The nuns are all extremely busy."

"I'd like to speak to Sister Cecilia," she says again, and adds as an afterthought, "Please."

Finally, they get Gitte, who says into her ear, "Rosa?"

"My husband made a mistake," Rosa says in lieu of greeting, and across the counter, Frau Diller's piggy-bank eyes squint over at her with keen interest, as gritty and silver-blue as dropped coins.

And Gitte, horribly: "Another?"

She closes her eyes. "Please, Gitte. If the Gestapo take us away," because what's the point of beating around the bush. "Will you take Liesel? The convent. Can the convent care for Liesel, like it did for us? I want her safe."

"Liesel?"

"Our daughter."

"The illiterate one?"

"She's not --"

But she doesn't get a chance to defend Liesel's exceptional progress, because Gitte, sweet, baby Gitte who took the name of the patron saint of music when she took her vows, completes her train of thought, her tone an incredulous arch, "But isn't she a Slav?"

Rosa pulls the phone away from her ear. She looks at it.

She looks at it the same disgusted way people inspect the bottom of a flyswatter for the gory remainder.

Then, numbly, she hangs up.

On the way home, two thoughts catch up with her, almost simultaneous.

The first is, _The Party got my sister._

The second is, _That's the first time we've ever called Max our son, and he wasn't there to hear it._

 

-

 

The first time she saw Hans Hubermann after the war, the day was swimming and warm, the sunshine a swampy, humid weight on the tops of their heads and their shoulders, and she was arm-in-arm with Franziska on the way back from church, Gitte on ahead of them and warning them of upcoming muddy patches by slipping on them, when a voice called out, "Fraulein Strauss!"

They all stopped, of course, and there, of all people, was Hans Hubermann, coming down the steps of his apartment block.

He looked different -- Rosa didn't know if it was him who'd changed between the day he left for war and the day he came back, or if it was her who'd been completely rearranged, who now looked at him different. His face was long, all his features pulled into one another, and his eyes caught the sunlight. He carried, of all things, an accordion, which sat perched in his hands like a serving dish.

Gitte recovered first. "Hans! You're back!"

"In one piece, even," he acknowledged, smiling at them all with difficulty. The roll call was slim: Wolfgang Edel was summoned home to Molching early after the death of his father in a poppy field outside of Nice, to take over his business. Herr Diller was killed defending the homeland, leaving his widow the sole keeper of their shop. Johann Hermann never came home from Russia.

Craters appeared before them, blown clean through their social map. They stepped with care.

He escorted them the rest of the way, still holding that strange accordion to his chest, where it bumped and wheezed with every step. None of them asked about it, though they were all curious: Rosa tried to remember if she'd ever seen Hans with an instrument before, and drew a blank. They talked instead about the summer markets, how they felt about German unification (good, of course, because what else was there to feel?), and Hans's parents, who they all saw once a week, and theirs, whose loss Hans was sorry for.

Finally, when they were nearly there and Franziska drew on ahead to shout something to Isi, who was waiting for them outside the gates, Hans stopped and said to Rosa, "Will you let me play something for you, Fraulein?"

He held up the accordion.

Her heart pulped in her chest, and she felt consciously aware of Franziska's absence from her side. "No, I will not," she answered politely, but firmly.

"All right, then," said Hans, easy.

He asked again the next week, and the week after that. The seventh time he offered, which was the same week that the soldiers left Molching with surprising little theatrics from Franziska, Rosa replied, "Only when you've perfected whatever it is you want to play me. Then I will listen."

He smiled at her in answer, so slowly it felt like melting, and from that moment on, it was understood that Rosa Strauss and Hans Hubermann had an arrangement.

 

-

 

He never actually asked her to marry him. Not formally, at least.

It just appeared in their plans one day, discussed right alongside everything else. Yes, he would be attending brunch with the nuns on Sunday; yes, the price of paint bricks had skyrocketed along with the price of _bread_ for Christ's sake -- the mayor was calling it hyperinflation, whatever that was; yes, when they had their own house, it would be on the Amper side of Munich Street, because the pollution from the factories upriver may have turned the water sluggish, oily, and devoid of any good fishing, but it was still greener than the _other_ side of Munich Street, don't argue with me, Hans.

Hans Hubermann, she learned, loved three things:

He loved his first cigarette of the day.

He loved a good innuendo. He ran a roaring trade in dirty jokes at the Knoller, but even better than that, he loved Rosa Strauss's face when she finally got it; two parts disgust, one part exasperation, and one part admiration, and all of it was his.

He loved that accordion, and because of that, he kept a little spare money in an empty sardine tin behind the tobacco. Every month or so, he would adjust the amount inside of it depending on what the boards at the Barnhoff said, but he made it very clear: they were never to touch this money, not for any emergency in the world. This would be saved for a train ticket to Stuttgart, should it ever be needed.

That money remained untouched for twenty years, until the morning an accordionist and a soldier named Kugler sat down to have a discussion.

"When I was young," the result of that conversation tells her, with the warmth of someone coming into a story they know is good, and she takes her scissors and grinds their jaws shut to show she's listening. She's cutting out the salvageable bits of linen to make new nappies; Liesel won't phase out of foster care for a couple years yet, but it doesn't hurt to be prepared for whoever might come after her.

Max does crunches on the basement floor, and his voice punches out of him in chunks on every rise, "When I was young, my idea of marriage was that the person you married had to be a person you'd knew you'd love for all of your days." He rises, touches elbows to knees, flashing her a winded wink of a grin. "When I was four, the only person I loved that much was my mother."

Rosa lifts her eyebrows. She rearranges the basket in her lap. "What did she have to say about that?"

Max's grin makes a second appearance, crowning over his knees. "I was very determined. I kept promising her, 'I'll marry you and you won't be sad,' and she always answered, 'you'll change your mind someday.'" He remains upright this time, breathing hard. There's color in his cheeks. "I remember being very insulted by that."

"She knew," Rosa assures him briskly. In her imagination, Erik Vandenburg's wife looks a lot like Max, sharing his starved smiles and the hollowness of his bird bones, and sometimes she even looks a little like Wilhemne Strauss. Surely she had to know how much her only son loved her.

"Yes," he agrees, and she thinks that's it, Max has shared all he's going to share today, except then he continues.

"My mother loved me long before I was born." She looks at him, but he's looking at the wall and a section of Liesel's dictionary. "She had the idea of me when she was still very small, and has loved me since that moment, so that when I finally arrived, there it was, waiting for me."

And it's Rosa's turn to say, "Yes," because she knows what that's like.

Two weeks after she and Hans posted a bulletin at the church announcing their engagement, she returned to her room from the washroom early and caught Franziska out of apron and blouse, which wouldn't have been strange at all if she hadn't been turned in such a way that the first thing Rosa saw was the gravid curve of her stomach, distending the band of her suspender belt.

She shut the door behind her, fast.

"You stupid _saumensch,"_ flew out of her mouth with such speed that it skidded on the floor, and Franziska jumped, covering herself hastily. Rosa dropped her voice, "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, _Franziska, what --"_

Her sister recovered just as fast, coming at her and fisting the fabric of her sleeves, hauling her in.

"Shut _up,"_ she hissed back, and forcibly sat her down on the edge of her bed. It was instinct, as natural to Rosa as breathing and insulting was -- obeying her big sister. "Listen to me --"

"He's not going to marry you," burbled out of Rosa. Her mind reeled and staggered. She wanted to go back to the way the world was a minute ago. "You do know that, right?"

"He will," Franziska said confidently. "But listen, Rosa, until then, he sends me money. I've been saving for months, I've almost got enough, _please,_ you can't say anything --"

" _Arschloch,_ I'm not telling anyone you've got one in the oven, are you crazy? The shame of it!"

"Shut up! With the money, I'll rent a room --"

"Where? Some hovel like Johannesburg Street? Or Himmel Street?"

"-- and I've got work promised me, and until I can get out, I'm going to keep this a secret, do you understand?" She put her hand over her stomach, automatic, protective, and the absurdity of the gesture struck at Rosa, a blow as strong as if she'd been smacked: Franziska thought she had to defend her baby from _her,_ her own sister.

She grit her teeth. She shuffled her thoughts, ordered them up, and filed them away.

"One thing at a time," she handed out. "How are we going to keep this hidden from the nuns? You're only going to get bigger."

For four more months, they did it. In the mornings, Rosa helped her with a girdle (" _saumensch,_ you can't wear this, what if you crush it?" "It's either crush it or I get caught, Rosa, and I promise you, I know which is worse, now shut up and help me with these eyelets,") and they dressed her in the biggest dresses they could scrounge up. Her ankles swelled, she tired quickly -- Rosa helped her with the washing to cover the drop in her productivity. It was just until Franziska could get that room. They just had to survive until then -- they had no illusions that all their problems would go away when they got to that point, but somehow, that didn't matter yet.

It was during this time that Rosa Strauss (soon to be Hubermann, and she wasn't sure if she liked how that sounded, Rosa Hubermann,) learned how to hide an entire person.

Franziska gave birth that autumn, merely three days after she made her farewells from the convent, carefully avoiding any interaction that might involve an embrace. She had the baby in her own house, which sat on one of the poorest streets in Molching, completely unfurnished. Rosa and Hans became her midwife purely by accident; they'd come to see the new place, the first one owned by a Strauss since their farm burned down, and found Franziska crouched like a bullfrog on the kitchen floor, alone except for the peeling-up linoleum and mice droppings. There was nothing there to welcome a new baby with.

"Is there a phone on this street?" Hans asked, helping Rosa support Franziska's weight as she keened and tried to squat again. "Should we call a nurse?"

"There's one in the shop on the corner," Franziska said at the same time Rosa spat out, "Are you _stupid?_ Look at this place -- there's no way a nurse will let a newborn baby stay here if she sees it. No, we deliver this baby and then we clean up this house and _then_ we'll call a nurse and pretend to be very surprised."

Franziska and Hans exchanged a glance.

Rosa, of course, saw a crisis and rose to the occasion splendidly.

"I think you and I have birthed enough animals in our time," she told her sister, rolling up her sleeves and giving her knee a slap. "Let's see how different humans are, really."

"Oh, thanks."

She turned to Hans. "You, be prepared to do exactly what I say."

"Yes, Fraulein."

There was no clean linen, so Rosa shucked her sweater and dress and laid that down as protection, leaving her in nothing but her shift. Franziska's clothes were already soaked; her waters had broke, she said, while she was cleaning out the stove. It left them with nothing to wrap the baby in when it came, but Hans fetched them the day's edition of the _Molching Express_ and peeled out the middle pages.

"Clean and warm," he said by way of explanation, handing them over. "Poor man's wool. We used to stuff our shirts with them in winter when I was younger."

"Thank you," said Rosa, and then, suddenly, before any of them were quite aware of it, there was a baby boy. It caught them off guard somehow, like all this time she knew her sister was carrying the next member of their family, growing it in secret the way other girls might try to hide a smoking habit, but somehow that thought didn't connect to what she pulled from Franziska's body, fully formed and screaming. 

"It's a boy," she announced.

Franziska tried to heave herself upright, her eyes glazed and face grey. "A boy?"

"A son." After all this time, a Strauss has a son. She took the hem of her shift and wiped his face, his chest, and what she could catch of his angry, kicking limbs, and then she wrapped him in the newspaper and handed him over. Franziska's eyes cleared as soon as his weight settled against her chest.

"Hello," she murmured. "Hello, my little secret. Hello. Welcome to the German Reich. You've missed a lot."

Rosa put a hand on her stomach, pressing down and feeling around, cataloguing Franziska's discomfited flinch. Afterbirth, hopefully soon. "Do you have a name for him?"

"'Hans' is very traditional!" came the input from the other room, where Hans was keeping himself busy by sweeping up the dust and dirt, and they all laughed; stupid, delirious, and relieved.

"This," Franziska tilted her arms, exposing her son's face. "This is your aunt Rosa. Say hello."

Very seriously, she informed the ruddy, squalling thing, "I still think your mother is a stupid cow."

"Ja, ja," and she leaned her head against Rosa's arm.

Afterward, when they'd hauled in a basin for washing and heated up water for a bath which both mother and baby enjoyed first, Rosa sat in the empty, swept front room and stared at the wainscoting. Hans walked in -- this whole time, he hadn't cringed once at the sight of blood. Rosa filed that information away. There was still blood in the creases of her knuckles, her wrist. It'd even gone up to her elbows.

He folded all of his long limbs up, crouching down next to her and taking her hand, blood and all.

"I've got no clothes on," she felt the need to point out to him. She was still in just her shift.

He smiled. He said, "I'm so glad I'm marrying you," with all apparent sincerity. It warmed her. And then, "You know, the house next door is being let."

"Don't even joke, you _saukerl."_

 

-

 

When Alex Steiner is sent to war in October, 1941, Rosa Hubermann shoulders into the Steiners' home and takes all the mending, because however Barbara might claim she enjoys being kept distracted, there's productively busy and then there's being being the sole provider for six children.

There are two baskets of clothes that'd been accumulating all summer, but with winter starting to blush against their windowframes in the mornings, and the reality of war sitting fat and swollen in the backs of their minds, it had gained priority. Rosa takes one and then the other down to the basement, setting them down with a thunk on the stair above Max Vandenburg's head.

"Do you know your way around a needle?" she demands when he makes his appearance, blotting a paintbrush dry on the inside pages of a _Molching Express._

Max nods. "Yes."

That's not the answer Rosa anticipates, and it throws off the next caustic thing that she'd had prepared. She's wrong-footed for a moment, which Max takes advantage of by emerging fully, leaving the paintbrush behind with its mates in a paintcan he's collected in his corner with the others. Max lives most of his life out of paintcans these days.

Steadily, he says, "What do you need me to do, Frau Hubermann?"

And since Rosa's hands are free, she wallops him. "You call me Rosa, you swine, and you help."

For the rest of the morning, they work, matching color threads and passing the needles and scissors back and forth. Weak sunlight pools on the stones from the open door above, and an ache starts in Rosa's back from continually craning herself to see what she's doing, but she doesn't retreat upstairs where the lighting's better.

After he finishes patching the elbows of a shirt much too small to belong to himself or Hans Hubermann, Max asks, "Whose clothes are these?"

"The Steiner's. They live next door --"

"Alex and Barbara. Kurt, Rudy, Anne-Marie," Max lists, and then squints a little at the wall, eyes ticking back and forth like he's reading something. "And Bettina's the youngest, I know that, but I've … forgotten the ones in the middle, I'm afraid."

"Hey now," says the middle child sitting across from him.

When she doesn't stop staring, he explains, "Liesel talks, I memorize," and then returns the spool of thread, reaching into the basket for the next article of clothing.

"And the mending?"

He pauses, smoothing the fabric down over his knee. "I come from a large family too, you know," he says with a voice that comes in two pieces, barely hinged together in the middle, and Rosa remembers that aching first year at the convent and lets it drop, swelling her belly up like a bullfrog and using all that wind to complain at great length about whatever comes to mind next; Frau Diller's prices, Liesel's lousy attempts at cleaning Frau Holtzapfel's spit off the door, Herr Schmiekl down at the Knoller, the party making Wolfgang Edel fly the flag from the front of his carpentry shop, like Wolfgang Edel had _ever_ set a foot out of line, for Christ's sake, what rock were they going to try to overturn next?

They darn the socks, they mend the fraying hems of coats and blankets, they patch up tears and worn-through holes in Hitler Youth uniforms and school blazers, and when Rosa takes the baskets back across the space between their houses, Barbara blinks at her in wonder.

"What do I owe you?" is what she finally manages to say, after she's seen the extent of the repairs.

"Bah," is Rosa's response to that.

 

-

 

She never liked being pregnant. She wasn't overly fond of babies, either -- she liked children best when they could articulate and correct their own behavior -- but she _really_ didn't like being pregnant.

When she delivered her own son, she reportedly handed him to her husband at the first opportunity and said, "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I am never doing that again," before rolling over and going to sleep -- much to the frustration of the midwife who was trying to change the sheets under her -- which naturally meant she found another baby quickening in her stomach before the year was out.

"You," she informed Hans Hubermann with great solemnity. "Are a complete _swine."_

Hans grinned at her, all his accordion-teeth on display, and said, "Come now, come look at this face," for he had Hans Junior in his arms, growing limbs akimbo and mouth fixed open, mid-snore. "Don't you love this face, Mama? He looks like you."

"He looks like he's about to pass gas."

"Yes, and? … _ow!"_

The goodness of those years swelled and waned with the seasons. Hans worked steadily -- business never boomed, and there was never much in the way of leisure money left at the end of the week (certainly not enough to necessitate the use of a bank, at any rate, although she might like to set foot in one someday, just to see what it's like,) but they were at least a comfortable breadth away from starving. Rosa did the washing and ironing for the houses on far side of Munich Street, because after all of her twelve-hour days at the convent, it'd gotten its hold on her. The children were healthy.

The only weevil in this bowl of oats was Franziska.

The soldier visited periodically, never more than once or twice a year, and each time he had the same promises. Franziska introduced him as "my husband, Karl," and kept calling herself by his name when he was gone. He genuinely seemed to enjoy Michael, who was now going on two and finding himself as pleased with the state of the world as his mother, which is to say, not at all. He still sent money, and what he didn't cover, Franziska did, doing the washing and ironing on _this_ side of Munich Street, where Rosa wasn't allowed to poach her customers.

"Why are you so angry at me?" she asked Rosa once. "I know this can't be about the coffee, I've already paid you back for that."

"I don't care about the coffee," Rosa agreed.

Her sister watched her. The weight of her gaze settled against her like a physical thing, and Rosa hiked up her shoulders, turning away to busy herself with wiping the mess that somehow had gathered on Hans Junior's face in the few moments since the last time she'd done the same thing.

Their entire childhood, Franziska Strauss had anticipated what her little sister wanted to say and said it for her, and she had no trouble doing it now.

"Don't you see what I've done?" she said very quietly. "Don't you see what I've created? What were my options, Rosa? Marry poor, like you? Take that monkey suit like Gitte? I took advantage of a situation."

"It's a _lie."_

Franziska made a rude noise. "Give it time and convince enough people and nobody will remember that it isn't the truth."

"Why can't you stop embarrassing yourself? You're still young, still beautiful -- there are men in Molching who could guarantee you'd live without fear," Rosa tried. Nobody made her try nearly as much as her sister. Her stupid, stubborn Strauss of a sister. "What about that _saukerl_ down the street? The one with the medal?"

Franziska's lip curled. "The _pffifukus?_ That whistler? Don't start with me, Rosa."

The argument never settled. At best, it just scabbed over, and both of them took care not to scratch it. Hans sometimes went over with the children so that they could drag Michael outside with them and he could play the accordion for all of them, but Rosa just slowly stopped. There were days when she felt like she'd merely outgrown her sister.

Some relationships end in rot; they decompose and fade away. Rosa wasn't so lucky.

In the beestung June of 1924, Franziska came to her with news. She was expecting again.

This time, she wore a ring on her finger -- something she picked up from a pawn shop in Munich, Rosa knew because she had to lend the money for it, but naturally she wore it around like it was the real thing, not a prop, and Rosa was sure there were people out there who'd never met Franziska before, who looked at her and saw nothing but a war bride with an absent husband. She never called herself "Strauss" anymore.

And this time, Rosa had no patience for her.

"You are ruining all your chances, you miserable _saumensch,_ I hope you know this," was the first thing out of her mouth.

Franziska made a cage out of her teeth, all wire grit. Everything about her seemed made of wire, now, thin and bent. "With you around, how could I forget?"

Rosa flared up, because how could Franziska let this happen? Again? And with that stupid _arschgrobbler_ who was never going to leave his wife and come live in this hovel on Himmel Street with her, didn't she know that? 

"I decided on him," Franziska snapped at her. "And I have him."

And Rosa spread her arms and yelled back, "No, you _don't!_ You are _not his frau,_ you _stupid_ cow! Pretend all you want, flash your ring up people's _arschlochs_ for all I care, it's never going to be real. _Never._ And you're going to be stuck here, raising his bastards." She ran out of steam, then, and took a moment to catch her breath, panting hard like her argument was a sprint. Her voice came out with a drag, "You poor _saumensch,_ how I pity you."

Whatever it was about that, she didn't know, but it did it: she saw the exact moment the scrape and throw of her words shattered the mirror glass of Franziska's expression.

Piece by piece, she reassembled herself.

She drew herself tall and glared Rosa down.

She said, heavy-handed, "You will leave. You will leave now. And from this moment on, if you ever see me again, you will not call me Franziska. You will not call me sister. You will call me _Frau_ Holtzapfel or you will call me nothing."

"Fine," Rosa said, and spat at her feet.

 

-

"Rosa?"

Max's voice comes meandering towards her. She's aware of its presence at her back, but it takes her a moment to acknowledge it.

"Rosa?"

"Yes?"

It puts its hands behind its back, and when she picks up the hot iron and turns towards it, it does something she cannot begin to fathom.

It says, "If they capture me --"

And that cannot be tolerated.

"No," she says, slamming the iron down hard enough to make the board rattle on its frame, and drags it across her husband's shirt with a harsh rasp. She speaks overloud. "No one is going to capture you."

Max doesn't even do her attempt at misdirection the courtesy of respecting it. He waits only a beat, then repeats, "If they capture me …"

There's a question in there. She contemplates not answering it, but it's not in her nature.

Strangely, it's her father's voice she hears in her head right then, an echo from deep within her memory like a well with a coin tossed in. Her father, with simple humor, simple faith, and a simple, plain-colored, whole love for his wife and daughters. She truly believes he could never have fathomed the situation she found herself in. _God won't like it, Rosa._

Finally, she exhales and shakes it off. 

Her relationship with God operates much the same way her relationships with everybody else does: with grudging, mutual tolerance that covers up a cynical amount of condescension, but this is one thing she has to disagree with Him on.

She puts the iron down. She looks over at Max and she says, "Ja," and then, "ja" again.

For Rosa Hubermann and Max Vandenburg, this is the summer of 1942. While Hans and Liesel are out painting, covering windows and doors with black paint for whatever meager barter they could scrounge from the people of Molching, Rosa takes a coil of rope in the dark of the basement and shows Max how to tie a noose. Then they practice it with linens, and with whatever clothes he might find himself with.

Just … for security.

"Who taught you this? Surely not the nuns."

"No," Rosa agrees with a laugh. The sunshine's pouring down the steps and the linen, for now, is ironed flat again. "No, it was -- well, actually, it was Michael Holtzapfel. He went through a spell at fifteen -- you know, as you do," and Max nods. His spell had come hand-in-hand with rising oppression, a dying uncle, and a yellow star sewn into his sleeve. "I think he just wanted somebody to know that he knew those knots. So he taught me, and with it, he stopped wanting to use them."

Her voice shifts at the end, and she sees Max's head lift as he notices it. Damn him anyway, he's been spending too much time with Liesel -- nosy, over-observant _arschgrobblers,_ the lot of them.

"Were you close? You and Frau Holtzapfel's son?"

"Ja. He was very young when we stopped calling me his aunt, but --" she jerks her shoulders. "Maybe he still remembered. I don't know."

 

-

 

Liesel comes home late one night with Rudy Steiner, pulling their bikes behind them, and Rosa's already snarling as she hauls her inside by the ear.

Until Liesel is safely accounted for and the door locked, they can't pull the curtains, which means Max can't emerge from the basement.

" _Saumensch!"_ she snaps out. "Where have you been, tromping to Berlin and back? The bathwater is cold!"

Liesel grimaces back. "Sorry, Mama, sorry. Yes, Mama," because they didn't keep Max alive all through a two-month fight with pneumonia just to dump him in cold bathwater because _somebody_ was too busy running around with that swine of a Steiner boy and couldn't get her scrawny _arsch_ home on time, honestly, it wouldn't hurt her to consider somebody else for once.

"I know you don't hold much water with cleanliness, _saumensch,_ but it keeps disease down, do you hear?"

"Yes, Mama."

"Give it a rest, Rosa!"

And his timely rescue gives her ample opportunity to lay into Hans, which she does gleefully, and Liesel makes her escape.

Later, while Max is toweling his hair dry by the fire and Liesel is downstairs, Rosa stands with her husband in the kitchen, taking advantage of a moment of peace to stretch her back. The weather report today, given Liesel's late return, included a night sky, with stars scattered like pinpricks of sugar on cold ground, she said. Rosa twitches the curtain aside briefly to admire the view, tasting the sweetness of it like it really was sugar.

Aloud, she wonders, "Do you think he'll marry her?"

"Rudy?" Hans chuckles, like there's anyone else they could possibly be talking about. "Aren't they a little young to be thinking about that?"

Rosa dismisses this with a flick of her fingers on the curtain. "I was their age when I decided on you."

When she glances over she can tell she has quite thoroughly surprised him. Good, that'll keep him on his toes. Rosa Hubermann is not one for easily fulfilling people's expectations. "I decided I was going to marry you, and then it was a matter of waiting for you to come to the same conclusion."

(Not long from now, in this very kitchen, Liesel will push Max's sketchbook across the kitchen table and say, "Here, Mama, I think this was for you," and Rosa's first instinct will be to laugh. Ever since that boy woke up and tumbled out of his nest and Liesel Meminger was the first thing he saw, everything he would ever say or write or draw in this house belonged to her. All of it, for her. He imprinted the way small and feathery birds do. What could there be in _The Word-Shaker_ that had anything to do with Rosa?

And then she will look.

On the page, there's a young girl with sharp-drawn lines of elastic hair done up in a bun, and with her is a young man with a long face who manages, in just a few lines, to radiate kindness. They're holding hands.

It's how Hans and Rosa would look if someone ironed all the wrinkles and stains out of them.

 _I decided on you,_ is the caption, and Rosa realizes he must have heard her, and her heart starts aching and doesn't stop, not for months.)

 

-

 

She never met Erik Vandenburg. She's never even seen a picture of him.

But when she imagines him, he always looks like Hans. Or, more to the point, like Hans did the first time she saw him after the war, like perhaps he brought home Erik's face as well as his accordion, coming back from the trenches in France. When she looks at the man she married, some part of her knows she's looking at Erik Vandenburg, too. This is his legacy.

Sometimes, moreso even than the accordion. The music Hans makes on that instrument is purely his own.

"I'm glad we got the chance to reunite them," is something he gives her, there at the beginning of the whole mess, returning home from the Knoller at half-two in the morning, and with the perfect clarity of the half-lucid, Rosa knows he's talking about Erik Vandenburg's accordion and Erik Vandenburg's son, together again under the same roof.

There are times when she looks at Max -- bent over his book or twitching his hair out of his eyes or pulling whatever pen or needle or other utensil she might need out of those organized shelves of paintcans he has -- and she thinks that wherever on the globe that accordion goes, there Max Vandenburg will wind up. It's not the most sensible connection Rosa's ever made, but she's fond of it. She believes in it like faith.

 _Keep that accordion safe, Rosa,_ she tells herself, hauling the basket of washing up the basement steps. _You never know when you will need it to call them all home._

 

-

 

Max Vandenburg leaves at just after 11 PM on the night Rosa's husband ruins everything.

The street is clear.

Liesel stays pressed against the window, too confused to even cry. Hans makes a bent-hanger shape in the chair, head in his hands. Rosa stands by the stove, helpless, stewing something that chunders and bubbles inside her stomach.

He'd asked her a question, just before he left, when they did an exchange: her directions to the ruins of her family's old farm for his sketchbook, which he handed over and said, _for Liesel,_ with his heart in his throat.

"How many loops, again, Frau Hubermann?" he said, directing his voice at the buttons of his coat as he did them up. "Is it seven?"

 _The noose,_ she realized. _He's double-checking how to tie the noose._

"Shut up," she bundled up every bit of fierceness she'd ever displayed and threw it at him, slapped him with it until she could see the imprint of it in red on his face. "You _shut up,_ and you call me Rosa, understand?"

He regarded her with calm eyes, wooded eyes -- she has never, she thinks, seen his eyes with the full weight of sunlight on them. What color would they be then?

She embraced him very tightly, a typical Strauss girl hug, all bruising strength. She can still feel it in her arms. "We'll see you in four days. You got it? _Four days,"_ and Max nodded and said, "of course," and then the door closed and he was gone. There's a ringing in Rosa's ears, like someone struck a glass with a tuning fork, and she turns away from the stove.

Liesel stays at the window, and somewhere, somewhere, her papa promises, "If they don't take me away, we'll bring him home, Liesel. He'll be safe by that area of the river."

In the bedroom, Rosa gives in, and twitches the curtains aside; at the end of the street, a shadow turns right and vanishes, his shoulders drawn up like they bear a great weight. Their prayers, she should think. They cling to him like feathers.

Rosa Hubermann never sees him again.

 

 

-  
fin


End file.
